Radio Shangri-La_ What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth - Lisa Napoli [21]
After more than two decades of reducing even the most complex issues down to a thousand words or less, I was tired of observing life from a distance, of synthesizing and distilling data with little time to process meaning. I’d long considered myself fortunate to have made my way in a cutthroat profession; when I was a kid growing up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, the news business promised glamorous access to a world far different from my own. Being able to ask questions and tell stories, much less getting paid for it, had long felt like a tremendous privilege. And yet, over time, the warping nature of the business was clear: Every experience could be spun as an item, and human relationships existed to serve the demand for news and information. The rushed conversations to facilitate deadlines had left me impatient in normal interactions; why couldn’t people get to the point faster? Quick, clipped scripts punctuated by quick, clipped communiqués via email seemed to be impacting my ability to think more deeply, to respond with the slow deliberation necessary for life’s bigger decisions. I felt like I was rushing, reacting, all the time.
Most of the jobs in journalism today are like information-factory work—Lucy-on-the-assembly-line style—or eating a steady diet of dim sum. You’d sample many items every day, fast, then gorge on the morsel assigned to you, trying to digest it as quickly as possible. A few hours later, you were expected to spew it out to the world in the form of a “story.” And on this particular radio show where I was currently employed, it had to be a very short story: ninety seconds or less, for the most part. Even though you probably couldn’t fake your way through a debate on the subject, you were suddenly an authority on it because millions of people had heard you talk about it on their commute home. The aftereffects were the same as an unsatisfying meal. Bloated, hungry—I felt hungry for knowledge, deeper meaning, time to synthesize the world around me.
I also worried about the effects of the news on all who consumed it. For all the good the global village had achieved—exposing us to other cultures we’d never visit, making us aware of strife in other parts of the world, educating us about important issues in our communities—it also was making us info-zombies. Just because the images are constantly beamed into our lines of sight in our living rooms, at the grocery store, while we were pumping gas, we live with the delusion that this virtual ringside seat to the action equals a real understanding of the world at large. Stuffed with factoids about the stock market and electoral college and weather patterns, the general public believes they understand these complex systems, when in fact they can’t adequately be boiled down to sound bites.
Context isn’t modern media’s strong suit, and the broadcast media in particular; raw data and pictures and sound are. The gray areas, the nuance, rarely get explored. Wars and starving children become images on the screen that you can turn off at will, not real, live complex problems. Bad things happen to other people. Thank God that didn’t happen to us, honey. Change the channel, please.
Now, my media malaise wasn’t simply a result of my midlife disillusionment. It had been brewing for ages. Since not long after I’d started working, in fact.
When the space shuttle Challenger exploded, I was a young copywriter at CNN Headline News. A tape editor and I were locked in a tiny room for the twelve hours afterward, charged with crafting half-hourly updates that incorporated into our report whatever information ticked off the AP news wire. I watched the shuttle blow up so many times that day, I knew in graphic detail how it had broken apart. The impact of seeing that horror play over and over led me to do exactly what you’re not supposed to do in a workplace, particularly in a newsroom: break down and cry. I couldn’t believe we were repeatedly watching people dissolve before our very eyes without pausing for a second to think about them. (It turned out later to be even worse: They hadn